It is well known that the pro leagues run educational programs for young rookies to prepare them for certain perils that face professional athletes, notably the attentions of opportunistic young women, who perhaps wish to become pregnant with the athlete's progeny and extort palimony or child support in the process. While the lottery-style payoff to the prospective vessel of this conception, immaculate or otherwise, seems like a merry deal today, in fact the economics of predatory groupies are about to get much better. For why would one resort to a single payment when a stream of payments could be earned instead?

How? The answer lies in cloning.

—————————————

smithers:

[Aside] Some people sing in the shower. I, on the other hand, have voices. And the voice I had in the shower one morning not long ago was that sports agents should soon bone up on bioethics and the intellectual property law dealing with genetics. Why? Because cloning procedures are continually improving, and some day it won't be necessary for the groupie to get laid in order to get paid, when all that will be required is a sample of hair or some other body tissue. My advice to all the aspiring 21st-century Mark McCormack's out there? When in Rome, do as the Romans: if you can't suppress a particular technology or social movement, find a way to cash in on it instead.

That's when all hell broke loose with Ted Williams.

[Exit]

—————————————

Yes, the spectre of human cloning and the broader transhumanist movement hit an awkward puberty recently with the strange story of Boston Red Sox legend Ted Williams. One of America's greatest war-era heroes ("Marine Fighter Pilot, Baseball Hall of Famer, Worldclass Angler" reads the official Ted Williams web site, and it doesn't get any more American than that), Williams passed away a little over a year ago, and was immediately sent to the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Arizona to be cryogenically frozen with the hope that one day the technology would be available to bring him back to life.

The story gets weird when it turns out that despite the perception Williams' whole body was suspended upside-down in cryostasis, in fact his head had been dismembered from the rest of his body to be stored in a separate container and was cracked nearly a dozen times in the process (which is apparently "normal" during such a procedure). Furthermore, eight samples of Williams' DNA had allegedly disappeared from the Alcor laboratories, and Alcor's COO recently resigned. Naturally, Alcor disputed that any patient had been mishandled, or that DNA samples had been stolen from the lab.

In a final twist, it has been alleged that the note expressing Williams' desire to be cryogenically suspended after his death, originally scrawled on a motor oil-stained scrap of paper, may have been forged by Ted's son John Henry.

Sports Illustrated's Tom Verducci wrote a scathing indictment of the saga, which appeared on the magazine's web site under a title that read: "What's happened to Ted Williams is an American tragedy."

Whoa — a little outside Tom! Though by replacing "an American tragedy" with "the American telos" you might have something that gets a little closer to the strike zone.

If Verducci and others really want the tragedy, it's that in the Society of Spectacle a story like Williams' becomes the punchline of a joke, or some other form of amusement intertextually incorporated into the matrix of programming, while circumventing serious debate in the process. But Verducci and his superiors at Sports Illustrated are equally complicit in the Spectacle, posturing as if this had anything to do with sport in the first place.

Spectacle aside, Verducci's wild pitch underscores the problem with sportswriters tackling the larger social issues of the day: they are nostalgic creatures by habit, ludic luddites who are unable to detect the shifts in the sensory environment caused by our technologies, and who find lewd the disappearing "purity" of sport. Sportswriting's roots lie in the hot medium of the newspaper, with the romantic, lyrical narrative of the truly gifted sportswriter (which Verducci certainly is) evoking rich sporting mindscapes for the sports fan to enjoy. In other words, sportswriters are unsuited for the pragmatic analysis of Teddy Baseball's cryostasis.

The analysis is thus:

Baseball, fighter pilots, motor oil: all the rich symbolism of industrial-age corporeality disintegrating into information, signaling the decay of the American Empire and freezing it for the posterity of future history. The triumph of modern capitalism, rational science, and abstract individualism have led us to the logical end point where the only economic and social need left to be served is to supersede the limits of our human bodies. We have trouble accepting the fact that we die. We are hysterical about aging. Surely human ingenuity can overcome these limits? Yet ne'er shall The Greatest Generation understand the ecology of this brave new world it has set us towards and thus it seeks solace in the warm nostalgic embrace of the simulated (re)creation of history.

* * *

To return to the proverbial groupie from the beginning of this article, it indeed appears that with black marketeering and continued improvements in the science of human cloning, one could create a team of All-Stars simply by purchasing a chip off the old Splinter — or a splint off the old Chipper, if mediocre National League outfielders are more to your liking.

The real question in my mind seems to be why only 8 samples of Williams' DNA went missing, when 9 are required to take the field. My guess is that the answer rests in modern science's inability to clone a pitcher from a hitter's body. I imagine that Alcor will be talking to long-in-the-tooth Sandy Koufax in the very near future …

Comments

One response to Splinters From An Old Baseball Bat

[...] "Baseball, fighter pilots, motor oil: all the rich symbolism of industrial-age corporeality disintegrating into information, signaling the decay of the American Empire and freezing it for the posterity of future history" (sportsBabel, Sept. 2003). [...]

Never believe that a smooth space will suffice to save us.

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari

sportsBabel

sportsBabel examines the aesthetics, politics and poetics of sport and physical culture, weaving between materiality, information, intuition and intellect. The notes posted here should be understood as emerging from an ongoing program of research-creation.

Threads of inquiry include: the security-entertainment complex and the militarization of sport; mediated sport as a spectrum of interactive possibility; the experiential qualities of postmodern sporting spaces; the cyborg body athletic manifest as mobile social subject; and the potential politics of a sporting multitude.

sportsBabel is produced by Sean Smith, an artist, writer and athlete living in Toronto, Canada. He holds a PhD in Media Philosophy from the European Graduate School in Switzerland and has exhibited and performed internationally as part of the Department of Biological Flow, an experimental collaboration in arts-based research inquiry with Barbara Fornssler. He was the inaugural Artist/Scholar-in-Residence at the University of Western Ontario in 2011-12, a participant at the Wood Land School – The Exiles residency in 2013, and one of the curators of Channel Surf, a 200km canoe journey and open platform for the arts that was one of 5 projects worldwide accepted to Project Anywhere in 2015.

He is currently adjunct faculty in wearable sculpture at OCAD University, a sessional lecturer on cartographies of the control society at the University of Toronto Scarborough, and one of the founding members of the Murmur Land Studios curatorial collective -- an experimental field school initiative begun in 2017 that offers event-based pedagogy in art, philosophy, kinaesthetics, ecology and camping community for the post-anthropocene era.

Sean's poetic work has appeared in Brave New Word, One Imperative, a glimpse of, Inflexions, the sexxxpo pwoermds anthology and the Why Hasn't JB Already Disappeared tribute anthology to Jean Baudrillard. He has performed poetic-philosophy work at Babel, Tuning Speculation, the Blackwood Gallery's Running with Concepts conference, and the Art in the Public Sphere speakers series at the University of Western Ontario's Department of Visual Arts. His first full manuscript, Overclock O'Clock, was published by Void Front Press in 2017, while three other chapbooks, tununurbununulence vOo.rtex, Verbraidids, and Syncopation Studies have been released in the past year.

sportsBabel was the basis for the Global Village Basketball project (2009-2011), which was an unfunded 24-hour basketball event that attempted to network together various pickup games from around the world into one meta-game; at its peak, players from 9 different countries joined the game to collectively score over 2,000 baskets in a meta Red vs. Blue contest. His other sports-art work has been presented in such varied spaces as HomeShop in Beijing during the 2008 Olympics, the Main Squared community arts festival in Toronto, SenseLab's Generating the Impossible research-creation event in Montreal, and in the courtyard of the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art during Nuit Blanche.

His latest project, Aqua Rara, weaves a practice of embodied art-philosophistry together with athletics and kairotic time to work as a performance-text between myriad water ecologies, swimming gestures, and watching the Aquarium Channel endlessly on loop.

department of biological flow

The Department of Biological Flow is a project of research-creation by Sean Smith and Barbara Fornssler exploring the concept of the moving human body as it is integrated with broader information networks of signal and noise.

The reference is from George Lucas' epic 1971 movie, THX 1138, in which a state-controlled intensification of communication processes manages every facet of daily life in a futuristic society, regulating the flux of all human subjects in work, leisure and love.

Though the Department exists in homage to Lucas’ vision, our consideration of biological flow seeks to reinvigorate the agency of the (in)human subject in its negotiations with economic and political structures both material and immaterial.